wfn.org | Reflections on "Romanized" Taiwanese and the Culture of Taiwan

["pctpress" <pctpress@ms1.hinet.net>]

Taiwan Church News 2746, 11 to 17 October 2004
Reported by Hsiao Shiuh-ching.	Translated and Rewritten by David Alexander

An international conference on Taiwanese Romanization (the system by which
the
richness of the spoken vernacular of this land is reduced to a written form
using Latin letters) was held at the National Taiwan Literature Studies
Center
in Tainan City on 9th and 10th October.  Scholars and interested laypeople
contributed papers, lectures and responses.

Professor Lu Heng-chhong, former head of the Department of Taiwan Literature
at National Cheng Kung University, spoke on "Taiwanese Romanization Again
Sets
Sail". He said that most study of Taiwan's literature takes into account only
that which was written in Chinese characters and in Japanese (between 1895
and
1945), but ignores the mass of material which was produced in the Romanized
text.  According to Professor Lu the publication of The Taiwan Church News,
beginning in 1885, puts the church at the very onset of a new stream in this
land's literary history.  He believes that the stream yet flows to us from
the
past, revealing influences within and upon Taiwan's society and history.  But
this archive can only be accessed through the use of the Romanized form of
writing.

He characterized materials written in Chinese characters as being made for
"sight reading". The Romanized text, by contrast, depicts what was heard, so
must be read with the ears.  It is a written form of an aural language.

In a separate presentation, the Rev. Ten Ji-giok, a long time promoter of
Romanized Taiwanese, reviewed the history of attempts to reduce this nation's
spoken languages to written forms. Different foreign groups have influenced
the linguistic environment of Taiwan.  Dutch missionaries in the 16th century
developed a system for writing out the language of the Suraya Aboriginal
group
in the part of South Taiwan that was under the control of the Dutch East
India
Company.  British and Canadian missionaries in the 19th century promoted
"Church Romanization" as a way to bringing the written scriptures to a
largely
illiterate population (education in Chinese ideographs was not common among
the poor).

Late in the 19th century Taiwan was ceded to the Japanese empire by the
defeated Chinese government. Taiwanese Romanization continued to flourish
until 1931 when Japanese militarism brought about its suppression in favor of
making all of this island's people over into proper subjects of the emperor
in
Tokyo.	After the end of the Second World War, when the Chinese Nationalist
party's government and military retreated to Taiwan following their defeat at
the hands of the Chinese Communist party, a concerted effort to make everyone
"Chinese" and "Nationalist" changed the linguistic environment towards the
Mandarin Chinese dialect. The mother tongues of all of Taiwan's people were,
if not suppressed, then devalued.

The incoming industrialized society was to be "Mandarinized," as were the
linguistic aspects of church life. The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, a
multilingual denomination (operating in Taiwanese, Hakka and 10 Aboriginal
languages every Sunday), stood against this trend.  In 1993 the church
established its own formal structures for mother tongue promotion and mother
tongue theology.

Rev. Ten called for a local theology expressed in mother tongues. Each
linguistic group should have the Holy Scriptures in a current idiom of its
own
mother tongue, and each be able to articulate the deepest things of faith in
its own words.	He encourages the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan to produce
new
translations of its own 1985 Confession of faith in all of Taiwan's many
native languages.

For More Information: hokkchu@hotmail.com  stgb@pchome.com.tw
Mother Tongue Committee  yasala@mail.pct.org.tw
Taiwan Church News is published weekly in Taiwan's local languages.
Visit our web site: www.pctpress.com.tw